The CDC 3000 series ("thirty-six hundred" of "thirty-one hundred") computers from

Control Data Corporation Control Data Corporation (CDC) was a mainframe and supercomputer firm. CDC was one of the nine major United States computer companies through most of the 1960s; the others were IBM, Burroughs Corporation, DEC, NCR, General Electric, Honeywe ...

were mid-1960s follow-ons to the

CDC 1604 The CDC 1604 was a 48-bit computing, 48-bit computer designed and manufactured by Seymour Cray and his team at the Control Data Corporation (CDC). The 1604 is known as one of the first commercially successful transistor computer, transistorized co ...

and CDC 924 systems. Over time, a range of machines were produced - divided into * the 48-bit upper 3000 series and * the 24-bit lower 3000 series. Early in the 1970s CDC phased out production of the 3000 series, which had been the

cash cow Cash cow, in business jargon, is a venture that generates a steady return of profits that far exceed the outlay of cash required to acquire or start it. Many businesses attempt to create or acquire such ventures, since they can be used to boost ...

s of Control Data during the 1960s; sales of these machines funded the company while the 6000 series was designed.

Specifications

Upper 3000 series

The upper 3000 series used a 48-bit word size. The first 3000 machine to be produced was the CDC 3600; first delivered in June 1963. First deliveries of the CDC 3400 and CDC 3800 were in December 1965. These machines were designed for scientific computing applications; they were the upgrade path for users of the CDC 1604 machines. However these machines were overshadowed by the upcoming 60-bit

CDC 6000 series The CDC 6000 series is a discontinued family of mainframe computers manufactured by Control Data Corporation in the 1960s. It consisted of the CDC 6200, CDC 6300, CDC 6400, CDC 6500, CDC 6600 and CDC 6700 computers, which were all extremely rapid ...

machines when the

CDC 6600 The CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation. Generally considered to be the first successful supercomputer, it outperformed the industry's prior recordholder, the IBM ...

was introduced in December 1964 and delivered in 1965. Some high-end computer labs purchased these machines as stopgaps, while waiting for delivery of their 6600 machine. (CDC had indicated that the 6600 machines would use the same assembler language.)

Lower 3000 series

The lower 3000 series used a 24-bit word size. They were based on the earlier CDC 924 - a 24-bit version of the (48-bit)

. The first lower 3000 to be released was the CDC 3200 (May 1964), followed by the smaller CDC 3100 (February 1965), and the CDC 3300 (December 1965). The final machine in the series, the CDC 3500, was released in March 1967 and used

integrated circuit An integrated circuit or monolithic integrated circuit (also referred to as an IC, a chip, or a microchip) is a set of electronic circuits on one small flat piece (or "chip") of semiconductor material, usually silicon. Large numbers of tiny ...

s instead of discrete components. The 3300 and 3500 had optional relocation capabilities,

floating-point arithmetic In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can be ...

, and ''BDP'' (Business + Data Processing) instructions. These machines were targeted towards business and commercial computing.

The 3150

's CDC 3150 was described as a "batch computer,""CSULB's first batch computer, a Control Data Corp. (CDC) 3150" and it included a FORTRAN and a COBOL compiler. Its console looked like
this

Instruction sets

The instruction set of the upper 3000 series was composed mostly of 24-bit instructions (packed two per word), but also contained some 48-bit instructions. The lower 3000 was based on a 24-bit subset of those available on the upper 3000 systems. It was therefore possible to write programs which would run on all 3000 systems. And as these systems were based on the prior 1604 and 924 instruction sets, some

backward compatibility Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especiall ...

also existed. However the systems did diverge from each other in areas such as relocation and the BDP instructions.

Memory

All 3000 series computers used

magnetic-core memory Magnetic-core memory was the predominant form of random-access computer memory for 20 years between about 1955 and 1975. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core. Core memory uses toroids (rings) of a hard magnet ...

. The CDC 3500 machine used the same core memory modules as used in the CDC 6000 / Cyber 70 series computers. 3302 core memory stack

Architecture

The lower 3000 CPU was a 24-bit architecture: instructions were 24 bits in length, as were the two operand registers A and Q. There were four index registers of 15 bits, B0 through B3, though B0 is always zero (zero when read; writes do not affect the value). There was no status (flags or condition code) register. Up to 32,768 words of core memory, 24 bits per word, could be directly addressed, and multiple banks could be switched in. Two or three memory bank configurations were the most common. Each instruction contained six bits of opcode, one bit specifying whether indirect addressing used, two bits of index register address and fifteen bits of address. Arithmetic was

ones' complement The ones' complement of a binary number is the value obtained by inverting all the bits in the binary representation of the number (swapping 0s and 1s). The name "ones' complement" (''note this is possessive of the plural "ones", not of a sin ...

, so there were two forms of zero: positive zero and

negative zero Signed zero is zero with an associated sign. In ordinary arithmetic, the number 0 does not have a sign, so that −0, +0 and 0 are identical. However, in computing, some number representations allow for the existence of two zeros, often denoted by ...

. The A and Q register could function as a combined 48-bit register for certain arithmetic instructions. The E register had 48 bits. The 3600 CPU could execute around one million

instructions per second Instructions per second (IPS) is a measure of a computer's processor speed. For complex instruction set computers (CISCs), different instructions take different amounts of time, so the value measured depends on the instruction mix; even for co ...

(1 MIPS), giving it

supercomputer A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructio ...

status in 1965. Much of the basic architecture design of the 3000 series was done by

Seymour Cray Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996
) was an American

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

for the CDC 3300 and CDC 3500 was called MASTER (Multi Access, Shared Time Executive Routine). MASTER was a multi-tasking, disk-based OS but still batch job oriented. Card jobs were cached to disk and printer output spooled. MASTER optimized memory usage with page-mapping hardware. An operating system called REAL-TIME

SCOPE Scope or scopes may refer to: People with the surname * Jamie Scope (born 1986), English footballer * John T. Scopes (1900–1970), central figure in the Scopes Trial regarding the teaching of evolution Arts, media, and entertainment * Cinema ...

existed for both lower- and upper-3000 systems. A disk-based version of SCOPE was eventually made available for the upper-3000 systems. FORTRAN,

COBOL COBOL (; an acronym for "common business-oriented language") is a compiled English-like computer programming language designed for business use. It is an imperative, procedural and, since 2002, object-oriented language. COBOL is primarily u ...

, and

ALGOL ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...

were available. The

assembly language In computer programming, assembly language (or assembler language, or symbolic machine code), often referred to simply as Assembly and commonly abbreviated as ASM or asm, is any low-level programming language with a very strong correspondence b ...

was called

COMPASS A compass is a device that shows the cardinal directions used for navigation and geographic orientation. It commonly consists of a magnetized needle or other element, such as a compass card or compass rose, which can pivot to align itself with ...

. These were available from CDC. An APL system for the upper 3000 series computers was developed at the

University of Massachusetts Amherst The University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst, UMass) is a public research university in Amherst, Massachusetts and the sole public land-grant university in Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Founded in 1863 as an agricultural college, ...

. This system was made available to other users of the upper 3000 series.

Character set

The operating systems for the CDC 3xxx typically used six-bit characters, so the ''64 character set'' did not contain lowercase letters. The character set contained (in display code order): : A-Z 0-9 + - * / ( ) $ = ''(space)'' , . # % " _ ! & ' ? < > @ \ ^ ; This six-bit extension of the four-bit BCD encoding was referred to as

BCDIC BCD (''binary-coded decimal''), also called alphanumeric BCD, alphameric BCD, BCD Interchange Code, or BCDIC, is a family of representations of numerals, uppercase Latin letters, and some special and control characters as six-bit character code ...

(BCD interchange code.) IBM later extended this code further to create the eight-bit "extended BCDIC", or

EBCDIC Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code (EBCDIC; ) is an eight- bit character encoding used mainly on IBM mainframe and IBM midrange computer operating systems. It descended from the code used with punched cards and the corresponding ...

code. Depending on the device, some characters are rendered differently, especially the lineprinter and some terminals: Note the absence of control characters, especially

carriage return A carriage return, sometimes known as a cartridge return and often shortened to CR, or return, is a control character or mechanism used to reset a device's position to the beginning of a line of text. It is closely associated with the line feed ...

and

line feed Newline (frequently called line ending, end of line (EOL), next line (NEL) or line break) is a control character or sequence of control characters in character encoding specifications such as ASCII, EBCDIC, Unicode, etc. This character, or ...

. These were encoded by the record structure.

Partial list of users

United States

Oregon State University Oregon State University (OSU) is a public land-grant, research university in Corvallis, Oregon. OSU offers more than 200 undergraduate-degree programs along with a variety of graduate and doctoral degrees. It has the 10th largest engineering ...

offered a CDC 3300 for use from the mid-to-late 1960s up until about 1980. It used a home grown operating system known as OS3 (for Oregon State Open Shop Operating System). The U.S.

Internal Revenue Service The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) is the revenue service for the United States federal government, which is responsible for collecting U.S. federal taxes and administering the Internal Revenue Code, the main body of the federal statutory t ...

used CDC 3000 series computers for many years. Northeastern University in Boston used a CDC 3300 in the early 1970s. International Timesharing Corporation (ITS) of Chaska, Minnesota sold timesharing services using CDC 3300s. (ITS later acquired another timesharing company that used CDC 3600s, before it, in turn, was acquired by United Computing Systems of Kansas City, Missouri.) California State University at Northridge had a dual 3170 that provided timesharing service to the California State University and College system. Many of the other campuses also had CDC 3150 machines for local batch operation. In 1970 CDC 3150s were installed at most campuses of the California State College system. San Jose State and LA State got CDC 3300s and served as regional data centers with (very flaky) data links to the other campuses. California State Polytechnic College (San Luis Obispo) and San Diego State University had IBM System/360s. The rest got 3150s. Typical configuration was 24K words of 24-bit core memory, four 7-track tape drives, drum printer, card reader, card punch, two 8MB disc drives (removable packs). At Humboldt State College where I worked this was used for both administrative and instructional purposes. It replaced an IBM 1620. The US Air Force used numerous CDC 3800 series systems in the

Air Force Satellite Control Facility The United States Air Force's Air Force Satellite Control Facility (AFSCF) was a space command and control unit located at Onizuka AFS, California. It has the distinction of being heavily involved in the world's first reconnaissance satellite pr ...

located at what is now

Onizuka Air Force Station Onizuka Air Force Station or Onizuka AFS was a United States Air Force installation in Sunnyvale, California, at the intersection of State Route 237 and North Mathilda Avenue. It was operational from 1960 to 2010. Its distinguishing feature was ...

in Sunnyvale, California. As part of the

Air Force Satellite Control Network The Satellite Control Network (SCN), operated by the United States Space Force's Space Delta 6, provides support for the operation, control, and maintenance of a variety of United States Department of Defense and some non-DoD satellites. This i ...

, they were used to do orbital planning and maintenance calculations for defense satellites until they were phased out and replaced by IBM mainframes in the mid-1990s. These systems used the

JOVIAL JOVIAL is a high-level programming language based on ALGOL 58, specialized for developing embedded systems (specialized computer systems designed to perform one or a few dedicated functions, usually embedded as part of a larger, more complete dev ...

programming language to provide the accuracy necessary for these calculations. The

Center for Naval Analyses CNA, formerly known as the CNA Corporation, is a federally-funded nonprofit research and analysis organization based in Arlington County, Virginia. CNA has around 625 employees. General CNA operates: * The Center for Naval Analyses. CNA's Cente ...

had a CDC 3800 from about 1968 until about 1975. It was used for scientific computing in support of operations research for the U. S. Navy. Michigan State University's Department of Computer Science and Engineering had a CDC 3600 CDC's South West Region had the following accounts late 1960s and early 1970s: :Long Beach Memorial Hospital, Long Beach, California (patient location tracking and billing) :Many of the California state universities (Fullerton, Los Angeles, etc.) in their engineering departments :California State College Los Angeles was also the California state southern region data center. (common admissions, etc.) :California State College San Jose, the Northern California regional data center, had a CDC 3300, as did LA State Southern Regional data center. :Jet Propulsion Lab (Pasadena, California) - test of various outer space modules :University of Texas, El Paso :Vandenberg AFB (missile launch control) (also two CDC 3600s - main base - use unknown) :Thompson-Ramo-Wollridge - Redondo Beach, California :Cal Poly, Pomona, California (engineering school) :Cal Poly Northridge, California (engineering school) :Point Magoo, Naval Air Station (weather balloon tracking/data analysis) :El Centro Naval Air Station :Camp Pendleton, California (US Marine Corps) - development/test bed for Marine Tactical Aircraft Command and Control System - MTACCS) - Initially 3300 - upgraded to a 3500 about 1973-74. :Beverly Hills Data Center - Part of the CDC Cybernet network and also a rarity for CDC - did complete bank computing for about 12 small local banks. A midpoint of the CyberNet system, it interfaced to the Los Angeles Data Center (CDC 6600). The banking accounts were acquired from Corporation for Economic, Industrial and Operations Research (C.E.I.R) - an IBM system (1401?) which was replaced with the 3300. This system had 8 or 10 CDC 854 disk drives and connected to a Burroughs model B-3000 magnetic ink character reader (MICR).

Europe

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...

used a CDC 3800 from 1966 until January 1969, when it was replaced by a CDC 6600. The 3800 was then acquired by State of Geneva and installed at the local University of Geneva. A number of CDC 3000s were installed in France, either in academic computing centers, in software companies or in the aeronautics, nuclear and oil industries. The University of Oslo had a CDC 3300 (1967 - 1976) One CDC 3300 was installed in the late 1960s in England, in Computation Research & Development Ltd, a London-based subsidiary of the civil engineering designers Freeman Fox & Partners. It was used for engineering calculations and commercial computing. It was de-commissioned in 1974. The German Meteorological Service

Deutscher Wetterdienst The () or DWD for short, is the German Meteorological Service, based in Offenbach am Main, Germany, which monitors weather and meteorological conditions over Germany and provides weather services for the general public and for nautical, avia ...

used a CDC 3800 and CDC 3400 for

Numerical weather prediction Numerical weather prediction (NWP) uses mathematical models of the atmosphere and oceans to predict the weather based on current weather conditions. Though first attempted in the 1920s, it was not until the advent of computer simulation in th ...

in late 1960s.

Oceania

There were many CDC 3000 series machines in Australia.

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government agency responsible for scientific research. CSIRO works with leading organisations around the world. From its headquarters in Canberra, CSIRO ...

had a 3600 installed in Canberra in 1964, with satellite 3200 machines in Melbourne, Sydney, and probably Brisbane and Adelaide. The Bureau of Census and Statistics had a 3600, 3300, and a 3500 in Canberra, with a 3200 in each of the six state capitals several of which were upgraded to 3300s about 1970.

Monash University Monash University () is a public research university based in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Named for prominent World War I general Sir John Monash, it was founded in 1958 and is the second oldest university in the state. The university has ...

had a 3200 delivered in 1964. Defence Signals Directorate had at least one. BHP had two 3300 machines at each of its Newcastle and Port Kembla Data centres. They were replaced by 3500s in 1977, and remained in operation until the mid-1980s.

Communist bloc

Communist-ruled Hungary obtained a CDC 3300 machine between 1969 and 1971. It was administered by the National Academy of Sciences throughout the 1970s, mainly for running scientific computations. Other CDC 3300 systems installed in former Eastern Bloc countries (list not complete): * Computer research centre Bratislava with contribution of OSN Development program, CRC/UNDP * Central Statistical Office, Prague. * Romanian Aircraft, Bucharest (3500 System)

Standard peripherals

* 405 - Card reader. 80 column 'high-speed' punched card reader * 415 - Card punch, 80 column card punch * 501 - Line printer, rotating drum, 136 character wide printer. Note that there were no lower case letters. * 505 - Line printer * 512 - Line printer, chain type * 601 - Magnetic tape drive * 604 - Magnetic tape drive * 607 - Magnetic tape drive * 609 - Magnetic tape drive (9-track) * 700 series - Optical page reader * 800 - Rotating magnetic memory series * 808 - Rotating disks, approx 32 inches per disk, approx 32-36 disks per spindle. * 852 - Disk drive with removable media pack, 2 to 3 million seven 7-bit characters, six disks (10 recording surfaces)/pack. Data-compatible with

IBM 1311 IBM manufactured magnetic disk storage devices from 1956 to 2003, when it sold its hard disk drive business to Hitachi. Both the hard disk drive (HDD) and floppy disk drive (FDD) were invented by IBM and as such IBM's employees were responsible fo ...

https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fs3data.computerhistory.org%2Fbrochures%2Fcdc.disk-852-4.ca1970.102646314.pdf * 853 - Similar to 852, 4 million characters. Media mechanically interchangeable with IBM 1311, but not recorded data * 854 - Similar to 853, 8 million characters * 915 - Optical page reader The CDC 6000 series were also initially marketed with many of the same peripherals.